A Tale of Love and Darkness (22 page)

That evening my mother spread a white cloth on the kitchen table, as though it were Sabbath or a festival, and served up Father's favorite dish, hot borscht with an iceberg of pure white cream floating in it. She
congratulated him. Grandpa and Grandma joined us to share our modest celebration, and Grandma remarked to my mother that the borscht was really very nice and almost tasty, but that—God preserve her from giving advice, but it was well known, every little girl knew, even Gentile women who cooked in Jewish homes knew, that borscht should be sour and just slightly sweet, certainly not sweet and just slightly sour, the way the Poles make it, because they sweeten everything, without rhyme or reason, and if you didn't watch them, they would drown salt herring in sugar, or even put jam on
chreyn
(horseradish sauce).

Mother, for her part, thanked Grandma for sharing her expertise with us and promised that in the future she would serve her only bitter and sour food, as that would be sure to suit her. As for Father, he was too pleased to notice such pinpricks. He presented one inscribed copy to his parents, another he gave to Uncle Joseph, a third to his dear friends Esther and Israel Zarchi, another to I cannot remember whom, and the last copy he kept in his library, on a prominent shelf, snuggled up close to the works of his uncle Professor Joseph Klausner.

Father's happiness lasted for three or four days, and then his face fell. Just as he had rushed to the post office every day before the packet arrived, so he now rushed every day to Achiasaph's bookshop in King George V Avenue, where three copies of
The Novella
were displayed for sale. The next day the same three copies were there, not one of them had been purchased. And the same the next day, and the day after that.

"You," Father said with a sad smile to his friend Israel Zarchi, "write a new novel every six months, and instantly all the pretty girls snatch you off the shelves and take you straight to bed with them, while we scholars, we wear ourselves out for years on end checking every detail, verifying every quotation, spending a week on a single footnote, and who bothers to read us? If we're lucky, two or three fellow prisoners in our own discipline read our books before they tear us to shreds. Sometimes not even that. We are simply ignored."

A week passed, and none of the three copies at Achiasaph's was sold. Father no longer spoke of his sorrow, but it filled the apartment like a smell. He no longer hummed popular songs out of tune while he shaved or washed the dishes. He no longer told me by heart of the doings of Gilgamesh or the adventures of Captain Nemo or Engineer Cyrus Smith in
The Mysterious Island
, but immersed himself furiously in the papers and reference books scattered on his desk, from which his next learned book would be born.

And then suddenly, a couple of days later, on Friday evening, he came home beaming happily and all atremble like a boy who has just been kissed in front of everyone by the prettiest girl in the class. "They're sold! They've all been sold! All in one day! Not one copy sold! Not two copies sold! All three sold! The whole lot! My book is sold out—Shakhna Achiasaph is going to order more copies from Chachik in Tel Aviv! He's ordered them already! This morning! By telephone! Not three copies, another five! And he thinks that's not going to be the end of the story!"

My mother left the room again and came back with the sickly sweet Tokay and the three tiny liqueur glasses. This time, though, she did not bother with the borscht or the white tablecloth. Instead she suggested the two of them go out to the Edison Cinema the next evening to the early showing of a famous film starring Greta Garbo, whom they both admired.

I was left with the novelist Zarchi and his wife, to have my supper there and behave myself until they got back, at nine or half past. Behave yourself, you hear?! Don't let us hear the tiniest complaint about you! When they set the table, don't forget to offer to help. After supper, but only once everyone has got up from the table, clear away your dishes and put them carefully on the draining board. Carefully, you hear?! Don't you break anything there. And take a dishcloth as at home and wipe the oilcloth nicely when the table's cleared. And only speak when you're spoken to. If Mr. Zarchi is working, just find yourself a toy or a book and sit as quietly as a mouse! And if heaven forbid Mrs. Zarchi complains of a headache again, don't bother her with anything. Anything, you hear?!

And so they went off. Mrs. Zarchi may have shut herself up in the other room, or gone to visit a neighbor, and Mr. Zarchi suggested I go into his study, which, as in our apartment, was also the bedroom and the sitting room and everything. That was the room that had once been my father's room when he was a student, that was also my parents' room and where apparently I was conceived, since they lived there from their wedding up to a month before I was born.

Mr. Zarchi sat me down on the sofa and talked to me for a bit, I don't remember what about, but I shall never forget how I suddenly noticed
on the little coffee table by the sofa no fewer than four identical copies of
The Novella in Hebrew Literature
, one on top of the other, as in a shop, one copy that I knew Father had given to Mr. Zarchi with an inscription, and three more whose existence I just couldn't understand, and it was on the tip of my tongue to ask Mr. Zarchi, but at the last moment I remembered the three copies that had just been bought today, at long last, in Achiasaph's bookshop, and I felt a rush of gratitude inside me that almost brought tears to my eyes. Mr. Zarchi saw that I had noticed them and he did not smile, but shot me a sidelong glance through half-closed eyes, as though he were silently accepting me into his band of conspirators, and without saying a word he leaned over, picked up three of the four copies on the coffee table, and secreted them in a drawer of his desk. I too held my peace, and said nothing either to him or to my parents. I did not tell a soul until after Zarchi died in his prime and after my father's death, I did not tell anyone except, many years later, his daughter Nurit Zarchi, who did not seem overly impressed by what I had told her.

I count two or three writers among my best friends, friends who have been close to me and dear to me for decades, yet I am not certain that I could do for one of them what Israel Zarchi did for my father. Who can say if such a generous ruse would have even occurred to me. After all, he, like everyone else in those days, lived a hand-to-mouth existence, and the three copies of
The Novella in Hebrew Literature
must have cost him at least the price of some much-needed clothes.

Mr. Zarchi left the room and came back with a cup of warm cocoa without skin on it, because he remembered from his visits to our apartment that that was what I drank in the evening. I thanked him as I had been told to, politely, and I really wanted to say something else, but I could not, and so I just sat there on the sofa in his room not uttering a peep, so as not to distract him from his work, even though in fact he did not work that evening but just skimmed backward and forward through the newspaper until my parents returned from the cinema, thanked the Zarchis, and hurriedly said good-night and took me home, because it was very late and I had to brush my teeth and go straight to bed.

That must have been the same room where, one evening some years earlier, in 1936, my father had first brought home a certain reserved, very
pretty student, with olive skin and black eyes, who spoke little but whose very presence caused men to talk and talk.

She had left Prague University a few months previously and come to Jerusalem to study history and philosophy at the university on Mount Scopus. I do not know how or when or where Arieh Klausner met Fania Mussman, who was registered here by her Hebrew name, Rivka, although on some documents she is called Zippora and in one place she is registered as Feiga, but her family and her girlfriends always called her Fania.

He loved talking, explaining, analyzing, and she knew how to listen and hear even between the lines. He was very erudite, and she was sharp-eyed and something of a mind reader. He was a straightforward, decent, hard-working perfectionist, while she always understood why someone who clung firmly to a particular view did so, and why someone else who furiously opposed him felt such a powerful need to argue. Clothes interested her only as a peephole into their wearers' inner selves. When she was sitting in a friend's home, she always cast an appraising glance at the upholstery, the curtains, the sofas, the souvenirs on the window ledge, and the knicknacks on the bookshelf, while everyone else was busy talking: as though she were on a spying mission. People's secrets always fascinated her, but when there was gossip going on, she mostly listened with her faint smile, that hesitant smile that looked as though it was about to snuff itself out, and said nothing. She was often silent. But whenever she broke her silence and spoke a few sentences, the conversation was never the same as it had been before.

When Father spoke to her, there was sometimes something in his voice that suggested a mixture of timidity, distance, affection, respect, and fear. As though he had a fortune-teller living in his home under an assumed identity. Or a clairvoyant.

THERE WERE
three wicker stools around our kitchen table with its flower-patterned oilcloth. The kitchen itself was small, low-ceilinged, and dark; its floor had sunk a little, its walls were sooty from the paraffin cooker and the Primus stove, and its one little window looked out
on the basement yard surrounded by gray concrete walls. Sometimes, when my father had gone off to work, I used to sit on his stool so as to be opposite my mother, and she told me stories while she peeled and sliced vegetables or sorted lentils, picking out the black ones and putting them in a saucer. Later I would feed these to the birds.

My mother's stories were strange: they were nothing like the stories that were told in other homes at that time, or the stories I told my own children, but were veiled in a kind of mist, as though they did not begin at the beginning or end at the end but emerged from the undergrowth, appeared for a while, arousing alienation or pangs of fear, moved in front of me for a few moments like distorted shadows on the wall, amazed me, sometimes sent shivers up my spine, and slunk back to the forest they had come from before I knew what had happened. I can remember some of my mother's stories almost word for word to this day. For instance, there's the one about the very old man, Alleluyev:

Once upon a time, beyond the high mountains, beyond deep rivers and desolate steppes, there was a tiny, out-of-the-way village, with tumbledown huts. At the edge of this village, in a dark fir forest, lived a poor, dumb, blind man. He lived all on his own, without any family or friends, and his name was Alleluyev. Old Alleluyev was older than the oldest men in the village, older than the oldest men in the valley or the steppe. He was not just old, he was ancient. So old was he that moss had begun to grow on his bent back. Instead of hair, black mushrooms grew on his head, and instead of cheeks he had hollows where lichens spread. Brown roots had begun to sprout from his feet, and glowing fireflies had settled in his sunken eyesockets. This old Alleluyev was older than the forest, older than the snow, older than Time himself. One day a rumor spread that in the depths of his hut, whose shutters had never been opened, lodged another old man, Cherni-chortyn, who was much, much older than old Alleluyev, and even blinder and poorer and more silent, more bent, deafer, more motionless, and worn as smooth as a Tartar coin. They said in the village, on the long winter nights, that old Alleluyev looked after the ancient Chernichortyn, washing his wounds, setting the table for him, and making his bed, feeding him on berries from the forest washed down with well water or melted snow, and sometimes at night he sang to
him, as one sings to a baby: Lula, lula, lula, don't be scared my treasure, lula, lula, lula, don't tremble my darling. And so they slept, the two of them, snuggled up together, the old man and the even older man, while outside there was nothing but wind and snow. Ifthey have not been eaten by wolves, they are still living there, the two of them, to this day, in their miserable hut, while the wolf howls in the forest and the wind roars in the chimney.

Alone in bed before I fell asleep, trembling with fear and excitement, I whispered to myself over and over again the words "old," "ancient," "older then Time himself." I closed my eyes and saw in my mind's eye, with delicious dread, the moss slowly spreading over the old man's back, the black mushrooms and lichens, and those greedy brown wormlike roots growing in the darkness. I tried to visualize behind my closed eyes the meaning of"worn as smooth as a Tartar coin." And so I swathed myself in sleep to the sound of the wind shrieking in the chimney, a wind that could never come near our home, sounds I had never heard, the chimney I had never seen except in the pictures in children's books where every house had a tiled roof and a chimney.

I had no brothers or sisters, my parents could hardly afford to buy me any toys or games, and television and computers had not yet been born. I spent my whole childhood in Kerem Avraham in Jerusalem, but where I really lived was on the edge of the forest, by the huts, the steppes, the meadows, the snow in my mother's stories, and in the illustrated books that piled up on my low bedside table: I was in the east, but my heart was in the farthermost west. Or the "farthermost north," as it said in those books. I wandered dizzily through virtual forests, forests of words, huts of words, meadows of words. The reality of the words thrust aside the suffocating backyards, the corrugated iron spread on top of stone houses, balconies laden with washtubs and washing lines. What surrounded me did not count. All that counted was made of words.

We had elderly neighbors in Amos Street, but their appearance as they walked slowly, painfully past our house was only a pale, sad, clumsy imitation of the spine-chilling reality of old, ancient Alleluyev, just as the Tel Arza woods were a miserable, amateurish sketch of the impenetrable, primeval forest. My mother's lentils were a disappointing reminder of the mushrooms and forest fruits, the blackberries and blueberries, in the stories she told me. The whole of reality was just a vain attempt to imitate the world of words. Here is the story my mother told me about the woman and the blacksmiths, not choosing her words but laying bare before my eyes with no thought for my tender age the full extent of the faraway many-colored provinces of language, where few children's feet had trodden before, the haunt of linguistic birds of paradise: